Of Gender and Genitals

In this chapter, Anne details the problems she sees with the medical establishments process of "creating" male and female infants. She brings up a number of very good points. First, the medical community has made it a practice to decide within the first 48 hours of a child's life the sex which it will have for the rest of its time in this life. I think that this is clearly a poor way to handle inter sex infants. When deciding the rest of a person's life, it should take more than 48 hours to come to a decision. Furthermore, many parents are not given access to the proper information or support groups to inform their decisions. One of my criticisms of Anne is her seeming belief that these children should not be operated on. While I understand and agree with her critique of our ideals about what male and female should be, we must admit that regardless of our personal beliefs, we do live in the society we live in. In an ideal world people would treat each other kindly and consider others emotions and feelings. Yet, if anything, this class and world events has shown that this is not the case. I think that she is somewhat idealistic in her beliefs, and that preserving a child's reproductive capability should be the most important factor in these decisions. I think that by giving parents more time to come to a decision and giving them the information they need to come to an informed decision on what path they would like to take, I believe that these issues will be better dealt with, instead of the arbitrary judgments made by many medical professionals. However I suspect that many parents would opt for surgery in the end.